Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 18 (Summer-Fall 2014) PDF Particularity and the Anarchism of Everyday Life Colin Ward was a libertarian communist. He named Pyotr Kropotkin as his primary economic influence, and described himself as “an anarchist-communist, in the Kropotkin tradition.” This was not empty praise. He produced an abridged edition of Kropotkin’s…

Download a PDF copy of Grant Mincy’s study Power and Property: A Corollary. The concept of property is widely discussed by social theorists and is a hot button issue within political circles. This is mostly because property is somewhat of an abstract concept. Property is a possession — it belongs to someone or something. Seems simple enough,…

Classical Liberalism and Conservatism: How is Chile’s “private” Pension System Best Conceptualised? Download a PDF copy of Dr. Mark Hyde’s study Classical Liberalism and Conservatism: How is Chile’s “private” Pension System Best Conceptualised? Introduction At the start of the 1980s, the Chilean state replaced a long-standing publicly-administered pension arrangement with a multi-pillar retirement system. Centrally, this…

Introduction to the C4SS Edition of Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow Kevin A. Carson Download a PDF copy of The C4SS Edition of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow. This book is actually a heavily abridged version of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops, edited by Colin Ward with a lot of his commentary thrown in….

Center for a Stateless Society No. 17 (Winter-Spring 2014), download this study PDF Introduction: The Primacy of Everyday Life David Graeber chose, as the epigraph to his book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, a quote from Pyotr Kropotkin’s article on Anarchism for the Encyclopedia Britannica. In it Kropotkin stated that, in an anarchist society, harmony…

I have argued before that scarcity is manufactured in many industries by the deliberate cultivation of economic demand through structures of artificial need. Given the importance of technology in these industries it should not be surprising that the manipulation of technological development plays an enormous role in the manufacture of these structures. The idea that…

Governance, Agency and Autonomy: Anarchist Themes in the Work of Elinor Ostrom [PDF] This paper is intended as one in a series, to be read along with my previous one on James C. Scott, on anarchist and decentralist thinkers whose affection for the particularity of local, human-scale institutions overrides any doctrinaire ideological labels. The Governance…

Destroying the Master’s House With the Master’s Tools: Some Notes on the Libertarian Theory of Ideology [PDF] We commonly look at ideology from the perspective of the ruling class, as a legitimizing tool. But ideology serves the purposes of the ruled, as well—as a guide to action in their class interest. The respective ideologies of rulers and…

The generation of energy, whether it be the gas you pump into your tank or the coal burned to produce electricity to power your computer, is estimated to contribute upwards of 82% of all greenhouse gas emission. To add insult to injury, many of these firms have long been associated with the more deleterious impacts of neoliberal development. Of course we all know about BP’s destruction of the entire Gulf region…

Kevin Carson’s fourteenth research paper argues that “it is the state’s constraints on market freedom that have created an economy centered on long-distance shipping and the automobile-highway complex.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson’s eighth paper — The Healthcare Crisis: A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity. [PDF] Healthcare: A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity By Kevin Carson “In healthcare, subsidies to the most costly and high-tech forms of medicine crowd out cheaper and decentralized alternatives, so that cheaper forms of treatment – even when perfectly adequate…